Publically available PICS Label Bureau for RDF migration testbed?

Hi PICS people,

I'm looking at ways of wrapping a PICS bureau as an RDF service of some
sort, but can't actually find a live PICS bureau to work with. 

The list at http://www.w3.org/PICS/bureaus.htm seems a little dated
(8/20/1996)  -- EvaluWeb times out, the PICS Incubator is offline, and the
NetShepherd and SurfWatch sites, while glossy, don't (for presumably 
sound commercial reasons, though see 3 below) don't seem to describe
machine-level interfaces to their networked rating servers.

So... a few things:

1. if there are live PICS bureaus out there available for testing (or
production use), please could you let me know

2. Are any PICS implementors interested in experimenting with a
PICS -> XML/RDF migration testbed? 
example issues: "what would a PICS bureau look like in the XML/RDF
world", "do we map our rating schemes manually or automatically when
migrating to RDF" etc


3. Should the machine-description of an XML/RDF ratings service (ie.
a PICS-NG bureau) include some provision for requiring user-level
visibility? 
This might encourage more services to expose publically
their machine-level interfaces. For example, if I could say
http://rdf.desire.org/ratings? is a ratings service that can be queried
for PICS/RDF labels for a given site. But also that
"http://rdf.desire.org/ratings?" has a "logoThatMustBeDisplayed"
property and a "serviceProviderWhoseHomePageMustBeLinkedTo" property,
whose semantics required that any software using that ratings service
should credit (as specified) the rating agency?
(I'm trying to think of ways in which owners of ratings databases might
be encouraged to make those ratings more publically accessible...)
I'd be very interested on perspective of ratings-content owners on this
last issue. 


Thanks for any pointers,


Dan




--
Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk                  
Institute for Learning and Research Technology http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
University of Bristol,  Bristol BS8 1TN, UK.   phone:+44(0)117-9287096

Received on Thursday, 8 April 1999 06:35:20 UTC